Engineering teacher Bruce Hill and his students , Ramon Sanchez, 17, left; Andres Lopez, 18; and Marc Sherrod, 18; work together building Foldscope during a Monday, March 5, class at Rancho Verde High School in Moreno Valley. The students have been working with Stanford University to construct and test paper-based microscopes that are being distributed to students around the world. Photo by Stan Lim, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG

But in this particular case, the scientific instrument was arguably more interesting than the magnified object.

This was not the conventional steel-and-glass microscope. Ramon was looking through a microscope that he had just assembled from a kit containing parts made of thin cardboard stock and a lens.

The Foldscope, as it is called, is something a team of innovators at Stanford University created a few years back. Manu Prakash and Jim Cybulski had traveled the world on science projects and found many schools and communities that had only bulky or broken microscopes, if any, because they lacked money to repair or buy them.

So they decided to build a paper-based microscope that costs about $1 in a bid to make scientific study affordable virtually everywhere.

Ramon Sanchez, 17, assembles a paper microscope during an engineering class at Rancho Verde High School in Moreno Valley on Monday, March 5.<br /> Photo by Stan Lim, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG

When the Moreno Valley school’s science department heard what the inventors were up to and that they were looking for feedback as they sought to refine the product, Rancho Verde educators embraced the idea.

As a result, teens in Moreno Valley are helping to change the world.

“We are helping globally, and it has just opened up the world to the kids,” said Bruce Hill, an engineering and science teacher. “We’re talking Nigeria. We’re talking the Congo. We’re talking El Salvador.”

From fall 2015 to fall 2017, Rancho Verde students — part of the Val Verde Unified School District — helped test the paper microscopes and offered suggestions for improving them. Perhaps the most significant suggestion, Hill said, was that the original cardboard material was too thick and difficult to work with. The inventors apparently listened, he said, as the paper used today is much thinner.

The testing phase is now over, Hill said, and the focus is shifting to manufacturing and distribution. According to the Foldscope website, the innovators hope to distribute 1 million paper microscopes by year’s end.

Rancho Verde’s role is shifting, too. The students are moving from testing to assembling paper microscopes for use in school field experiments, where bulky traditional steel-and-glass microscopes are impractical, Hill said.

Rancho Verde ordered 60 paper microscopes and students such as Ramon have been piecing them together.

Students in Bruce Hill’s engineering class construct an inexpensive, paper-based microscope called a Foldscope.<br /> Photo by Stan Lim, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG

Hill said Foldscopes are ideal for the field because they can be set up quickly.

“The kids can pick up a blade of grass, mush it onto the glass and see the chlorophyll,” he said.

Portability and affordability appear to be paramount goals for the inventors.

“We believe that every child in the world should carry a microscope in his/her pocket … just like a pencil,” the website states.

For the Rancho Verde students, the global connection with a class project is beyond cool.

“I think it’s a great experience to actually design one of these,” Ramon said, “and to know that they go to other places around the world.”

Dave is a general assignment reporter based in Riverside, writing about a wide variety of topics ranging from drones and El Nino to trains and wildfires. He has worked for five newspapers in four states: Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona and California. He earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from Colorado State University in 1981. Loves hiking, tennis, baseball, the beach, the Lakers and golden retrievers. He is from the Denver area.

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